Life with Father is the notable work that defines Clarence Day's place in American letters, a title that has attached itself to his name across the decades since his death in 1935.

Day was born in New York City on November 18, 1874, and he died in that same city on December 28, 1935, at the age of sixty-one. He was educated at Yale University, and his working life as a writer encompassed an unusually wide range of forms. He was a poet, an essayist, a cartoonist, a humorist, a screenwriter, and an autobiographer, producing work throughout in English and operating squarely within the American literary tradition. That range of practice — moving between verse, visual art, and prose — gave his career a restless, plural quality that resists easy summary.

As a humorist and autobiographer, Day worked in modes that required both comic instinct and close attention to personal experience. His identity as a cartoonist sat alongside his identity as an essayist, and both alongside his work as a screenwriter, suggesting a writer comfortable with shifting registers and audiences. These overlapping roles were not incidental to one another; together they constituted the full scope of what he produced across his writing life.

Life with Father stands at the center of that body of work, the single title by which Day has continued to be identified. He died in New York City on December 28, 1935, and the record of his career — poet, cartoonist, humorist, essayist, screenwriter, autobiographer — remains the most concrete measure of what he accomplished.